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TV Viewing & Scheduling

Watching TV through the DVR instead of through the standard set is a pretty comfortable experience. It takes a little longer to startup than it would usually, but I get far more information with this setup than I would normally and it’s a pretty seamless operation. Being able to hit record when you’re watching a programme is a cool feature.

Scheduling also worked very well, and the recordings were of good quality and easily accessible through the browser. I would have liked to have seen an automatic recording of 30 seconds or so as that allows you to go “what was that?” and have your own TV instant replay. As it stands, if you want to do that you need to hit timeshift, in which case it starts recording from that point, allowing you to rewind at will. This does work well, but functionality could be improved.

UI

The user interface is improved nicely over the latter version found on the HD and HD mini. It’s got a nice clean layout, and works well for the most part. The only issue I had with it was that previews could take a long time to load. By long time, I only mean 4 seconds, but when you’re scrolling through a load of folders with images in, and it needs to pause for that time (you can’t do anything while it loads) on every folder, it can get pretty annoying.

One nice little tweak is the fact that list scrolling is endless, in that when you get to the bottom of a list or menu, it simply continues on to the top. On previous iterations you needed to scroll back up.

Problems

Despite the nice additions the DVR has, there was a couple of specific problems that irked me.

• The fact that you can’t use the D-Pad to fine tune your skip through a video file. This isn’t a problem with DVDs, but with standalone video files… that you might have downloaded or something, this is annoying. It was present in the HD and HD Mini, it seems weird to remove it. I’ve spoken with ACRyan and this is apparently down to the realtek chip that they use.
• No internet browser. This seems incomprehensible that a device that’s connected to the internet, can download torrents, view RSS feeds for some reason can’t access the internet. I want to browse youtube on this thing, check my facebook. If the ACRyan boxes made my TV into an HTPC instead of a media station, it would take it to a new level of greatness.

Cost

The 1TV version that I reviewed here would run you around £220, which is quite a bit. However, £50 of that is taken up with the internal HDD though of course ACRyan won’t be paying full cost.